01 March 2010

Rail to Tullamarine - a broken promise worth revisiting?

THE AGE (1Mar): Airport road won't cope with demand, study shows

TRAFFIC could grind to a halt on the freeway to Melbourne Airport in the next two decades unless dramatic action is taken, modelling commissioned by the government shows.

Despite this, Public Transport Minister Martin Pakula has said the state government will not resurrect Labor's ditched 1999 promise to build a rail line to the airport.

For the past nine months, the government has been again studying traffic to the airport.

The Melbourne Airport Transport Requirements Study, completed by consultants IMIS, predicts traffic to the airport will slow to a crawl by 2021 unless major changes are made.

In 2007, 22.5 million passengers passed through Melbourne Airport. By 2028, this is predicted to rise to 50 million a year.

Read the full story

What do you think? Is an airport rail link a project worth landing? Click comment below to have your say)

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

I live at the southern end of Moonee Valley, a council that is rated poorly by many of the ratepayers in my area, Flemington.
We would call ourselves an inner suburb, at a pinch a northern suburb, and yet we don't appear in the surveys to date.
Surely you don't regard us as a western suburb, do you?

Nothing against western suburbs, but issues affecting Sunshine, Derrimut and Werribee don't affect us other than producing yet more bluddy car traffic flooding through our once reasonably quiet streets!

We need a railway line to the airport, despite the governments whinging that it would destroy the taxi industry (that'd be a good idea, eh? a few less cars on the road in the peak hours) or the claim that the bus service is "good enough" Try telling that the older folk trying to get even one big suitcase aboard while the driver sits watching. Do you remember that they used to load your cases for you? Do you remember when the return tickets used to be for 12 months, now it's only three months.
What about the other broken promises? Rail to South Morang? put it back to Whittlesea where it use to run to and from, build the line to Aurora, the new suburb that was built around the promise of good PT. Rowville, and the rest of the broken promises.

Sorry, a minor rant there.

Regards

Graham

Anonymous said...

I now live in Country Victoria (NorthWest) and travel into Melbourne regularly to travel interstate by Air.T reduce my travel times I use a Public transport link from Sunbury and can travel to the airport at no cost. I therfore would not be pleased to be forced to pay the additional fares in place to protect the rip off Taxi and Airport Bus services. Thes exceed my airline fares in some cases. A good idea to get people out of their cars would be a rail link between the south western, Western, North Western, Northern and Eastern Rail services via the Airport. This would also enable movements around melbourne instead of through it.

Anonymous said...

Yes PLEASE!! Is embarrassing when you compare, and just don't like the lack of an enviro-friendly option, having to catch cabs!

Anonymous said...

Why spend scarce transport money on people who use PT once or twice a year, or on visitors? Please dont waste it, spend the money on the system for those that use PT every day.

Anonymous said...

Oh, and if you want to be enviro friendly - don't fly in a jet. Flying at all makes a train vs cab enviro argument wholly irrelevant.

Anonymous said...

I'm with Graham. Flemington used to be such a great place to live but we are slowly choking in fumes given our unenviable location between city and airport. And the toll roads and level crossings blighting our rail lines clog the traffic back up even further. I too heard the Minister (Pallas?) recently lauding the airport bus service and decided then and there I could never again vote for this government. It is not just about the individual trip to and from the airport, it's about the overall environmental, social and economic impact of this decades-long refusal to take a no-brainer transport option from idea to reality. I would definitely vote for anyone who would geniunely champion this development.

We don't need another study on aiport traffic. Just build the train link and integrate it into the network rather than consider some separate public-private ripoff premium service. The individual cost of current taxi and bus services means everyone I know who is not fuelled by goverment or corporate largess gets dropped off and picked up. The greed of Melbourne Airport restricting pickup access on fatuous security grounds has not dented this unneccessary stream of one-way, one-person traffic.

Slighty off PT topic, but transport all the same: Does air traffic need to grow to 50 million? I read flights between Barcelona and Madrid (the previous 4th busiest world air route) more than halved in the year after a fast train was introduced (2.5 hrs, 600+kms, city centre to city centre). More than 6 million people fly between Melbourne and Sydney each year and then hit the road at destination. A melbourne-canberra-sydney fast train is another thing we've been hearing about for 20+ years. Such a rich country so rapidly falling behind the rest of the world... If we can't even build a 30km rail link to an airport it is beyond contemplation that I would ever see a fast train network connecting our east coast cities.

Fuming in Flemington

Mark C. said...

Kill two birds with one stone - the Government has just released a huge swathe of land in the north-west which will hold tens of thousands of houses and will require public transport. Run a rail line from Werribee (on the Werribee Line) to Sunbury (on the Bendigo Line) through this new housing area, into the back of the airport and out at Jacanta (on the Craigieburn Line). Electrify the existing lines from Albion (on the Sydenham Line) to Jacanta and dual-gauge the standard gauge line (which used to be broad-gauge). This solution covers airport users from all over Melbourne, although southern suburbs users would have to travel via the CBD and a dedicated train service from (say) Caulfield to Tullamarine via the CBD would be required.

nerrida said...

Rail to airport imperative for the thousands being crammed into high rise inner city buildings. They will not have cars. How many buses can cope with proposed masses?